


The Conversation

by Dragontrill



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-it fic, PTSD, Post-Endgame, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:15:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragontrill/pseuds/Dragontrill
Summary: After Endgame, Bucky talks to the older version of Steve and is surprised at what he learns.





	The Conversation

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [The Conversation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23013694) by [ogawaryoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ogawaryoko/pseuds/ogawaryoko)



> There were things I didn’t like about how they resolved the Captain America arc in the MCU, so this is my head canon for how to resolve it. I’d have liked this to be longer. I’d have liked this to be the whole multi-chaptered, epic story about Steve’s return to the past instead of what’s basically just a summary of it, but like Bucky I have PTSD from being in the military. That’s why my writing has pretty much dried up. Just about everything is a thousand times harder than it used to be and I’m lucky this short fic was written out at all.
> 
> If anyone reads this and gets inspired to write Steve’s story, I’d love to read it.

Bucky stood alone and watched Sam talk to the old version of Steve. Watched him pull out a perfectly intact, round shield. Watched him hand it over.

Bucky didn't know how to feel about any of it. Part of him had known that Steve would stay in the past once he had a chance to return to it; his depression had been too easy to spot and the past must have been too great a temptation, despite all his attempts to put it behind him. Steve Rogers had never really found his place in the modern world, just as the post-Hydra Bucky didn't always know if he'd ever find his anywhere.

After more talking and a hug, Sam came back past Bucky, carrying the shield.

"You should talk to him," he said when he went by.

Bucky didn't answer, undecided. He knew what he meant to Steve, understood exactly what the man had given up for him, but he'd long since stopped being the Bucky of the Howling Commandos or of Brooklyn. Steve had broken him of his brainwashing, but Bucky couldn't follow him the way he used to; couldn't fight anymore the way he had. He'd only gone to fight Thanos because he'd promised T’Challa he would if called, after T’Challa swore he'd only ask if there were no other choice. He'd be paying for that decision for a long time. Even now, the memory of the fight against Thanos' monsters left him anxious and shaking.

Sometimes, just being near Steve and knowing the fight would follow him sooner or later left Bucky anxious and shaking.

Right now, this old version of Steve sat quiet and patient with his back turned, giving no sign he was going to start any kind of fight. So finally Bucky walked over to stand beside him, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets so Steve couldn't see how tightly his fists were clenched.

"So you really stayed back there," he said at last. The thought of going back himself was... too big to contemplate, so his mind veered away from the very concept.

Steve's face had never looked so serene as it did now while he sat there on the bench, hands clasped while he gazed out over the lake.

"Yup," was all he said.

Bucky didn't know what to say while he thought about Steve going back in time and living along their timeline, obviously not doing anything major to risk changing anything, or else how could he still be part of it in order to sit here now? Steve had explained the rules of time travel to him just that morning, before he went to return the Infinity stones and Mjolnir. To know the future and do nothing about it must have driven him nuts, but he looked so content.

Bucky looked down at the obvious wedding ring on his finger. "At least you got to marry Peggy," he said, a little lamely.

Steve looked up at him at that. The colour of his eyes hadn't changed at all, Bucky noted.

"I didn't marry Peggy," he said.

Bucky blinked. "Huh? But I thought..."

Steve smiled. "That I went back for her? It would have been nice, but no. I knew she'd find a husband and have children. I'm not so much of an asshole that I could take that from her. Besides, she looked at my haircut and the fact that I'd aged twelve years and it took two nanoseconds for her to realize I wasn't the same man." A remeniscent smile crossed his face. "She pulled a gun on me."

Bucky sat down on the bench beside him, confused. "So why did you stay? Why did you leave your friends here?"

Steve sighed, his hands rubbing together while he looked down at them. "My friends here didn't really need me. You don't need me." Bucky automatically opened his mouth to protest and Steve shook his head. "I know I trigger your PTSD, Buck. It's not your fault."

It wasn't Steve’s fault he looked like a young Alexander Pierce either, Bucky thought but didn't say. It was a hateful truth he had too many nightmares about, but he couldn't stop the mad connections made by his own mind, no matter what technical miracles Shuri came up with.

"Most of the Avengers are just coworkers," Steve went on. "Sam isn't. But he is the most balanced man I know. He'll be fine. Natasha... if Natasha had lived I never would have stayed back."

"You miss her, "Bucky said a little stupidly.

"Every day, "Steve admitted, "which makes no real sense since I saved her from the Red Room when she was three years old."

"What?" Bucky managed, feeling like he'd just been blindsided by a truck.

Steve smirked at him, the bastard. "You thought I sat on my ass playing house for the last seventy years?"

"Well, yeah. You're here, aren't you?"

"Of course. I still had my GPS device with the original coordinates, but I come from a very different timeline. I wanted to give Sam the shield and let everyone know I was okay. And see you."

Bucky's eyes narrowed. His brain felt like it was going to nope completely out of there, but he wanted to know. “Steve, what did you do?"

Steve's eyes still looked guilless and innocent, despite the wrinkles all around them, and Bucky still didn't believe them for an instant.

"Who, me?"

Part of Bucky wanted to give in to the anxiety flooding his system and get out of there, since the last seventy years had taught him that old white men were the most dangerous. Another part wanted to smack Steve upside the head.

"Spill," he said instead.

Steve chuckled, hands up in surrender. "Okay, okay. I planned to tell you if you asked anyway.”

Bucky frowned, his head tilting to one side."Only if I asked?"

Ducks flew in to land on the lake with a clattering of wings and splashes. "I figured you'd just know already," Steve said, eyes on the birds.

Bucky looked down at the gravel around the bench instead. "It's hard for me to know anything these days, Steve. "

"I know, I know." Steve sighed. “I should have reminded myself before I came.”

"So why did you stay in the past if it wasn't to marry Peggy?" Bucky asked.

"To fix the mistakes I made," Steve told him. "To finish the job I left undone."

Bucky stared at him. He could only half remember his life before Hydra, another thing that made it hard for him to really connect to the man sitting beside him, but he did remember the train.

His nightmares wouldn't let him forget the train.

"What happened to me wasn't your fault."

Steve gave him a sardonic look. "Whether it was or not, do you think for even a second I wouldn't do something about it if I got even a glimmer of a chance?"

"No..." Somewhere in this multiverse Banner rambled about, a him who started out as the same him Bucky had got to escape everything with Hydra. That was… another thing too big to contemplate and his mind noped right away from it onto another tangent.

"How did you even find me?" he whispered.

"Arnim Zola. Once I’d convinced Peggy I wasn't a spy, I went to see him. He'd already been recruited into Operation Paperclip. Zola got very talkative once I was hanging him by his throat off the edge of the building.”

Bucky blinked. "I don't remember you as the type to drop people off the edge of buildings."

"I was feeling very motivated."

Bucky really couldn't sort out how he felt. "So you saved me."

"Me, Peggy, the Howling Commandos, and the other ime. I knew where I’d crashed, so we dug him out of the ice."

Bucky shook his head. Yeah, even he could tell all of that would result in a alternate timeline.

"So which one of you got to be Captain America?"

Steve gave a lazy shrug. "He did. He was still all fired up in his ways and I'd long since stopped trusting the government. Knowing what was going to happen didn't help. So Steve went back to war and I took you home to Brooklyn."

"Really? You left the war?"

"Steve had it in hand and honestly, I’d been at war for a long time. I knew I was burnt out and needed to rest. I learned a lot here in the future about mental health and the need to take care of it. Plus, I had to take care of you."

Bucky could imagine what kind of mess he'd been. They hadn't started programming him to be an assassin right away, but they sure hadn't stinted on the torture. 

"The other Steve couldn't have been happy about that."

"He wasn't. He wanted you to stay too, where he could keep an eye on you, even with you having only half an arm. So I beat the crap out of him, resigned my commission, and took you home."

Bucky closed his eyes. That sounded like heaven, a piece of paradise he’d dream about when the days got bad. "Was I all fucked up?"

"No," Steve told him and the dream got a little brighter. "Well, you really didn't like doctors and you once laid out someone who called you a cripple with one punch, but no, you got better in time."

He might have been crying, but Bucky wasn't sure, and Steve knew better than to touch his cheeks to wipe any tears away. For once, Bucky almost wished he would.

They were both silent there for a long time, until Bucky felt together again enough to open his eyes. The sun was almost down to the horizon and the ducks long since flown away. The breeze was cool, much cooler than he'd got used to in Wakanda.

"So what else did you do for the last seventy years?" he asked at last.

Steve's smile was still serene, one of a contented man who had no regrets, the depression Bucky saw in the younger version of him just that afternoon now gone.

"Caused a lot of trouble. pissed off a lot of people. Made sure Hydra stayed dead. Browbeat Howard into paying attention to his son. Stopped a lot of terrorist attacks. Stopped a lot of CIA attacks, which were much the same thing. Ended up with Natasha as a daughter. Stole the tesseract from Fury. Stole a cat from Fury. Stopped a lot of things from happening. Ended up spending a long time running from Captain America. You, me, Nat, and that cat ended up leading a very nomadic existence.”

Bucky went from wondering why Steve would steal a cat to saying "I stayed with you?"

"Yes." Steve twisted the ring on his left hand. "I had a better frame of reference to understand you than 1940's Steve did. At least until he was older. "

Bucky stared down at the ring on Steve's hand. "Steve, if it wasn't Peggy, who did you marry?"

Steve's hand stilled and for a moment Bucky wondered if he wouldn't say. He’d never been a Coward, though, and that certainly hadn't changed now.

"Once it became legal, you."

Bucky closed his eyes again against a rush of emotions and desires, first illegal, then repressed, then burned out of him along with most of the man had been, replaced now with this broken thing who could barely even touch another person in even the most public of ways. A moment later he noped away from it all.

"Sorry I couldn't be that for you here," he said and his voice sounded hollow.

Steve smiled at him. "You've always been everything to me, Buck. Always. I didn't just go back for you and both of us know my being in your life here and now brings back too much of the bad. I don't blame you for that."

"Sometimes I do."

"Don't," Steve told him. "Hydra doesn't deserve to have any of the blame taken away from them." His wrist chimed and he swallowed. "That’s my five minute warning. They're going to pull me back. Stark, Van Dyne, Parker, a few others you don't know and, well, you.”

Bucky stared at him. He was never going to see this man again. Steve was going to go back to a husband who wasn't a shattered wreck who broke a tiny bit more every time he saw him, and that was actually okay.

Impulsively, he leaned over and pressed his lips to Steve's in their first- millionth? -kiss. It was gentle and Steve didn't do anything other than smile when he pulled away.

"I'm going back to Wakanda," Bucky said. "I have my goats there and if T'Challa doesn’t call on me, I don't plan to ever pick up a weapon again."

"You'll be okay there?" Steve asked.

Bucky nodded. "My neighbours are nice, I'm never cold, and I’m the only caucasian in a thousand miles. Nazis aren't known for recruiting black people, so I don't jump every time someone comes to visit. I’m healing. I don't know who I'm healing to be, but it's someone. I think I might even like him."

Steve's smile hadn't dimmed. "I’m glad to hear that." The chime sounded again. "It’s time.”

Bucky stood and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Goodbye, Steve.”

"Bye, Buck."

Bucky walked away. He didn't look back.

**Author's Note:**

> I want to point out that I don’t have any problems with Steggy. I do have a problem with Steve being written as basically taking her agency away from her and erasing the family he knew she’d had and loved just so he could get what he wanted. The theory of him having been her husband and basically sitting on his ass for the last seventy years doing nothing about what he knew would happen also doesn’t work for me. Yeah, right. No fucking way. That’s not the Steve Rogers I know. So this story got written. Hope everyone liked it.
> 
> I also know this isn’t a perfect ending for Bucky, but PTSD can really fuck you up. Trust me, I know. Sometimes all you can do is the best you can do and find happiness in that.


End file.
